Mysterium

“I might be out of uniform. I might be in disguise.” The boy inspected him more closely. He shook his head: “It’s not just your clothes.”

“Okay. Still—you should be careful.” Clifford nodded.

The boy had left his bicycle inclined against a tree. He offered Howard half a sandwich wrapped in brown paper and a drink from a thermos of cold water. Howard had brought his own water on this expedition, two Coke bottles tucked into the deep pockets of his jacket, but most of that was gone. He drank from the thermos and said, “Thanks.”

“My name is Clifford.”

“Thank you, Clifford. I’m Howard.”

The boy offered his hand and Howard shook it.

Then, briefly, they worked at the food. It wasn’t much of a sandwich, Howard thought, but it was better than most of what he’d been eating lately. Some kind of coarse-ground bread, some meat, probably military rations, not bad if you were hungry. He discovered he was very hungry indeed.

He finished the sandwich and licked the pale grease from his fingers. “Have you been here before, Clifford?”

“A few times.”

“Long ride out from town, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Howard felt at ease with the boy. Maybe it was his obvious myopia or his solemn style, but he felt an echo of his own childhood here. One look at Clifford and you knew he was the kind of kid who kept a collection of coins or bugs or comics; that he watched too much TV, read too many books.

His eyes were pinched and cautious, but Howard supposed that was natural; everyone was cautious nowadays.

He said, “How safe is it up here?”

“It’s a long hike up from the valley. I’ve never seen a soldier here. Mostly they stay near the trucks.”

“How often do you come here?”

“Maybe once a week or so. Like you said—it’s a long ride.”

“So why come at all?”

“Find out what’s happening.” The boy gave Howard a thoughtful stare. “Why are you here?”

“Same reason.”

“You walked from town?” Howard nodded. “Long walk.”

“Yup.”

“First time?”

“Yes,” Howard said. “At least, since the tanks came.”

“It’s quiet today.”

“Isn’t it always?”

“No,” the boy said. “Sometimes there are more soldiers or more Proctors.”

Howard was instantly curious, but he didn’t want to intimidate the boy. He ordered his thoughts. “Clifford, can you tell me what they do here? This might be important.”

Clifford frowned. He balled up his sandwich wrapper and tossed it into the dark of the woods. “It’s hard to tell. You can’t see much without binoculars. Sometimes they take pictures. A couple of times I saw them sending soldiers in.”

“What—into the lab?”

“Into one of, the buildings.”

“Show me which one.”

They crept to the edge of the escarpment. The boy pointed to a tall structure at the near perimeter of the parking lot: the administration building.

Howard remembered Chief Haldane and his firefighters on the first Saturday after the transition. They had ventured a few yards into that radius and had come out babbling about monsters and angels… and sick, Howard remembered, perhaps sicker than they knew. Haldane had died this September, of symptoms that sounded like a runaway leukemia. “I’m surprised they can go in there.”

“They wore special clothes,” Clifford said, “like diving suits, with helmets. They went in and they came out.”

“Carrying anything?”

“Boxes, filing cabinets. Books. Sometimes bodies.”

Bodies, Howard thought. The installation wasn’t as empty as it seemed. Of course not. People had died here… died in their beds, most of them, neatly out of sight.

“They’re really well preserved,” the boy added.

“What?”

“The bodies.”

“Clifford—from this distance, how can you tell?” The boy was silent for a time. Some nerve had been touched, some delicate truth. The boy avoided Howard’s eyes when he finally spoke:

“My mom has a friend. A soldier. Who comes over. That’s how we get bread for sandwiches. Chocolate bars sometimes.” Clifford shrugged uncomfortably. “He’s not a bad guy.”

“I see.” Howard kept his voice carefully neutral. “But he talks sometimes?”

The boy nodded. “At breakfast mostly. He brags.”

“He’s been here?”

“He was on duty when they brought out a body. He said it was like it only just died. It hadn’t decomposed.” Another shrug. “If he’s telling the truth.”

“Clifford, this could be the most important part yet. Do you remember anything else he said? Anything about what they’re looking for here, or what they found?”

The boy settled on a granite shelf away from the lip of the escarpment. “He didn’t say too much. I don’t think he’s supposed to. He said people come out of there, even the ones in suits, talking about the weird things they’ve seen. They can’t stay inside too long or go too far. It makes them sick. Some of the first people who went in, died.”

Howard thought again of Chief Haldane’s leukemia.

“And at night,” the boy continued, “everybody leaves. Nobody stays out here at night. It gets strange.”

“Strange how?”